Ben Affleck has never really held back when it comes to talking about his time in the cape and cowl, and in a new GQ cover story, he opens up even more about why it all went sideways. From misaligned expectations to personal struggles, it’s clear that Affleck’s Batman era left a mark, but not the kind some fans hoped for.
Affleck said: “There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience, and they don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever.
“I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me. But I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that.
“A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations. And also by the way, I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.”
I think that Affleck’s older, more world-weary Bruce Wayne had promise, and he says he still stands by that creative idea. But things started to unravel when the tone of the DC films started shifting away from general audiences.
The actor explained: “What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh shit, we have a problem.’
“Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.”
The clash between vision and audience expectations isn’t new in superhero films, but for Affleck, it felt especially chaotic. He’s previously called working on Justice League “the worst experience,” and now he’s more candid about his own role in the mess.
“I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge,” Affleck said. “But more of my failings of, in terms of why I had a bad experience, part of it is that what I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness.
“So I wasn’t bringing a lot of positive energy to the equation. I didn’t cause problems, but I came in and I did my job and I went home. But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.”
Now at the helm of his production company, Artists Equity, Affleck says he’s trying to build something that avoids the very issues that plagued his Batman stint.
“I want to put together partnerships and filmmakers and cast and a studio apparatus that’s aligned, where precisely that kind of misalignment doesn’t happen and you have a much better work experience.”
Affleck may be done with superhero movies, but he’s also saying is that he’s done with the chaos and miscommunication in the filmmaking process, and he wants to make it a better experience for everyone involved.
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